Lucent Silver WiFi Card Question

[J English Smith]

Can anyone help? I am having trouble connecting on my home network with my Powerbook 1400/166 equipped with a Lucent/Orinoco Silver card. It works fine on the open network at work, but at home, with WEP enabled, when I check the TCP/IP settings on the Mac, it is only filling in the IP address and the subnet, but not the router address or the name server address. I think I did manage to connect last week, but only with WEP disabled on the wireless router (entirely open network). The silver card is, I thought, able to handle WEP encryption ok.

Is there any workaround on this, or other things I should try? I don't want to be without at least WEP level protection at home. (My Pismo with airport card handles the WEP security level just fine.) If I have to track down a gold card to make it work, I will, but I don't want to buy that only to have the same problem!

Thanks for any advice...

 

[Gorgonops]

The difference between the "Silver" and 'Gold" Lucent cards is the "Silver" only supported 40/64 bit WEP, while almost everything else in the universe uses 104/128 bit WEP. The original Grey Airport base stations only supported 64 bit WEP so by default Silvers work fine with them, no hacking, but on newer wireless access points it can be "confusing" to figure out how to make them work in 64 bit mode. (On some APs if you only enter a 5 character/10 hex digit WEP key it'll automatically switch to 64 bit mode, while entering a longer code enables 128 bit. Others might have a checkbox hidden somewhere on their UIs.) If you're willing to change to 40 bit WEP on your AP then you should be able to run with the Silver card. Just keep in mind that breaking *any* WEP encryption is technically completely trivial (there are war-driving tools that can do it in a few minutes at most), so all enabling WEP does is keep "casual" users sniffing for an unlocked network out. It's like locking your screen door... don't depend on it actually protecting you from "bad people".

For the record, the hardware is identical on the "Silver" and "Gold" cards. The Silver firmware just cripples it. If you have a Windows laptop with a PCMCIA slot and can find the appropriate firmware updater files there's a tool that can hack a Silver to a Gold here.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Have you considered simply getting a game adapter and using that for wireless? I have a WGA600N velcro'ed to my TiBook/867 which is powered off the FireWire, and the WGA handles the WPA2 to the house wireless.

While you couldn't get that elegant with the 1400, you could still use it "tethered."

 

[Unknown_K]

I have a stack of silvers I use with my old Thinkpads and Wallstreets. Under OS 9.x with the wavelan drivers you need to input either 0x or x before you type in the WEP key or it does not work. I use an old Linksys wired/wireless B router and have no problems connecting (I tell the router to only use the list of mac addresses of the cards I own). Also make sure you are using the correct key (my router has like 4 of them).